Okurounmu attacks Nwabueze over Igbo position on conference

Chairman of defunct Presidential Advisory Committee on the planned national conference, Dr. Femi Okurounmu, yesterday lambasted Prof. Ben Nwabueze for his comment on the report of the committee.

Okurounmu told reporters in Abeokuta, the Ogun State capital, that Prof Nwabueze and the Igbo Leaders of Thought, relied on “hearsay” to take their decision on the conference.

The Igbo Leaders of Thought, last week, said anything short of a new constitution would not be acceptable to the Igbo.

The leaders said the panel recommended an amendment to the constitution instead of a new one.

Okurounmu said: “The criticism was surely meant to be a setback for the conference by injecting a crisis of confidence between the committee, the people and the government. Without doubt, the critics have added more fuel into the fire of the opposition to the conference…

“That is why the chicanery of the critics must be exposed at once because by the time their unethical and unprofessional conduct is fully grasped by the public, they would merely have succeeded in destroying their own credibility, lowering their own esteem in the eyes of the public and eroding whatever respect they may have hitherto enjoyed.

“The Nwabueze-led group has clearly gone beyond the bounds of decency and decorum by fabricating a report purely from their own imagination and levelling such scathing criticisms against it with a view to discrediting the real report, which it has obviously not yet seen.

“I shall resist the temptation here to disclose what my committee’s report actually recommends in an attempt to refute the unsavoury allegations against the report. This is because it is the President who appointed us, and it was to him that we submitted the report.

“It is, therefore, up to the President to decide whether or not to make the report public. I can say very emphatically, however, that the above allegations are false. They are wild, mendacious, obfuscatory and ill-intentioned.

“As Africans, we respect elders, and Professor Nwabueze is not only an elder but also a seasoned academician. It is, therefore, amazing that he would be part of a group, much more lead the group, that would be criticising a report they have never seen or read. That is very much unlike how leaders and elders behave.

“It is also known and well published in the media that Prof Nwabueze is nursing an illusion that he is one Mr. Know-All for Nigeria, who Mr. President should entrust with the sole responsibility of drafting the Constitution for Nigeria.

“It is either he is put in charge to do it and do it alone the way he wants or whoever does it is not doing it right, even if the person is doing it the same way he will have done it. It just had to be Prof Nwabueze. He thinks he has the solutions to Nigeria’s problems and anything that is different from his solution could be wrong.”